Icelandair put out a casting call this spring for a professional photographer to shoot its next global campaign. The one requirement, spelled out plainly in the listing: you had to be bad at the job.
Not “beginner welcome.” Not “no experience necessary.” Bad — blurry framing, awkward angles, the kind of photo you’d normally delete off your own camera roll. Somehow, that pitch worked. 127,642 people applied.
After roughly 2,000 hours of screening, Icelandair narrowed the field to 13 finalists and picked a French applicant named Blanche Montemard, whose application included the line: “I approach photography the way people pack carry-ons — ambitiously but limited by reality.” They paid her $50,000 and flew her to Iceland for a 10-day shoot to headline their global campaign.
